June 15th 2020

By Bill Berkowitz 

In addition to founding the multi-billion-dollar Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby chain, the Green family is known for their oft-trumpeted Christian values, and the founding the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Some of the family’s values were codified in a 5-4 2014 Supreme Court decision – Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. -- that allowed Hobby Lobby to exercise its freedom of conscience and refuse birth control coverage for its employees. However, in pursuing artifacts from the Middle East for its Museum of the Bible, the Green family have all too often taken a rather un-Christian approach; buying purloined goods and then having them smuggled into the U.S.  

Artnet’s Eileen Kinsella pointed out that “In 2017, US government attorneys filed a civil action against Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., outlining a years-long, willful pattern of illicitly smuggling Iraqi artifacts into the US despite numerous warnings, interceptions, and large-scale purchases that were ‘fraught with red flags.’ Thousands of smuggled objects were eventually returned to Iraq and Hobby Lobby paid a $3 million fine.”   

Didn’t Steve Green, the mega-wealthy, politically savvy head of Hobby Lobby, and a big-time donor to Christian Right causes, realize that paying pennies on the dollar for ancient artifacts being sold by people in a war-torn region, might ring some major mega-church warning bells? The Kansas City Star’s Mary Sanchez asked: “Can you lie, traffic in stolen goods and line the pockets of murderers if it allows you to, say, accumulate a bunch of neat-o artifacts for a Bible museum in Washington, D.C.?”

I asked these questions in a 2017 piece titled Did Hobby Lobby’s Illegal Pursuit of Ancient Mesopotamian Artifacts Provide Support to Terrorist Groups?, which discussed how Hobby Lobby was forced to pay a hefty fine, and return artifacts that it had collected in 2010 and 2011 and tried to have shipped to its Oklahoma City headquarters, presumably for display in various museums and public institutions. 

Now, after another purchasing snafu, Beth Stoneburner, writing for the Friendly Atheist recently asked: “Does the Museum of the Bible have anything worthwhile inside?” 

The Green family’s Museum of the Bible

During her visit to the Museum of the Bible, Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, found a mishmash of history and the imaginings of such Christian nationalists as David Barton, “taking on the task of protecting the myth of America’s Christian foundations, the pattern of assertion by omission yields to something closer to outright distortion.” It seems, Stewart wrote, like “the Bible is the Forest Gump of history. Wherever something big is happening, the Bible is there, and it’s always doing good.”  

The Museum of the Bible’s mission statement says its goal is to give visitors “an immersive and personalized experience with the Bible and its ongoing impact on the world around us.” 

“To that end,” The New York Times’ Tom Mashberg reported in April, “David Green and his son, Steve, 56, have dedicated more than a decade and an estimated $50 million to amassing an eclectic assemblage of 50,000 artifacts related to the Old and New Testaments.”

According to Mashberg, “Many of the objects they collected were printed bibles, biblical artifacts, illuminated manuscripts, artworks and ephemera, most of which date from the 1500s to the present. Exhibits today include Elvis Presley’s bible and letters on theology signed by Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther. They are now housed in a $450 million, eight-story, 430,000-square-foot building, a soaring, ark-like structure that features 14-foot-tall bronze panels inscribed with Hebrew verses from the Book of Genesis and a ‘biblical roof garden’ with expansive views of the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall.

“But most of the museum’s older items,” Mashberg noted, “those that stretched back to ancient times, quickly led to problems. They included 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets, slivers of papyrus, cylinder seals and clay bullae — all relics from ancient Mesopotamia that showcased some of the earliest forms of written communication. One of the items was inscribed in Sumerian with passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of mankind’s earliest sagas of gods, floods, beasts and prophecies.”

The ‘Gilgamesh Dream Tablet’ scandal

The “Gilgamesh Dream Tablet,” purchased by the Green family “at auction for $1.6 million, is actually owned by the nation of Iraq according to a complaint from the U.S. Justice Department.” U.S. federal prosecutors are now seeking to return the roughly 3,500-year-old clay tablet to Iraq. 

According to the Court document, “The Gilgamesh epic is a Sumerian epic poem written in cuneiform. A twelve-tablet Babylonian version, written in Akkadian, was discovered in 1853 in the ruins of the library of the Assyrian King Assur Banipal in Nineveh (located in modern-day northern Iraq). The events in the epic revolve around King Gilgamesh of Uruk (located in modern-day southern Iraq). The epic is considered one the world’s oldest works of epic literature.” 

Popculture’s Victoria Moghaddami recently reported that “The tablet seems to have been passed around more than once before landing the hands of Hobby Lobby. It's believed to have surfaced around 2001 when a U.S. antique's dealer took possession of it, buying it and several other pieces for $50,350. The dealer then sold it to two other buyers and appeared in a catalog for $450,000. With it, they posted a false letter claiming it had been owned by only one person for the last 25 years and that it was acquired at a 1981 San Francisco auction.”

"Whenever looted cultural property is found in this country, the United States government will do all it can to preserve heritage by returning such artifacts where they belong," Richard Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. "In this case, a major auction house failed to meet its obligations by minimizing its concerns that the provenance of an important Iraqi artifact was fabricated, and withheld from the buyer information that undermined the provenance's reliability."

Now, in light of finding another of its artifacts found to be stolen from its place of origin, Hobby Lobby is suing Christie’s, seeking to get its money back, “alleging that the auction house did not do its due diligence in investigating the tablet’s legal status,” Artnet’s Eileen Kinsella reported.

“This lawsuit seeks a recovery for our client based upon promises made when the Gilgamesh Tablet was sold in 2014,” Michael McCullough of Pearlstein & McCullough, the firm representing Hobby Lobby, said in a press release. “We will be joining our lawsuit with the government’s forfeiture action and we are very confident that we will be successful in recovering the purchase price from Christie’s.”

Suing Christie’s does not absolve Hobby Lobby of its pattern of wrong doing in acquiring treasures for it museum.  Christianity has a long history of appropriating traditions in order to become the dominant religion in Europe – such as the solstice and Christmas, and the equinox and Easter.  The Green family appears to be confusing cultural appropriation with a return to the nefarious history of 19th century tomb raiders in the Middle East.